Main menu

Post navigation

Seeing the Value in Task Estimates

You might be aware of the ongoing discussions around the #noEstimates movement right now. I have the luxury here of rarely needing to use estimates as commitments to management but I usually (not always) still ask my teams to estimate their tasks.

3 weeks ago I joined a new team. I decided I wanted to get back into the commercial side of the business for a while so I’ve joined our Sales Operations team. (Think DevOps but for sales admin, systems, reporting, targeting & metrics).

Fortunately for me the current manager of the team who took the role on a month or so earlier is amazing. She has so much sales domain knowledge, an instinct for what’s going on and deeply understands what’s needed by our customers (the sales teams).

I’d been working with her informally for a while getting her up to speed on agile project management so by the time I joined the team already had a basic whiteboard in place, were having effective daily standups and were tracking tasks.

The big problem with an ops team is balancing strategic and tactical work. Right now the work is all tactical, urgent items come in daily at the cost of important but less urgent work.

We’re also facing capacity issues with the team and much of the work is all flowing to a single domain expert who’s due to go on leave for a few months this Summer – again a common problem in ops teams.

I observed the movement of tasks on the team board for a week to understand how things were running, spot what was flowing well and what was blocked. As I observed I noted challenges being faced and possible improvements to make. By the end of the week I started implementing a series of near-daily changes – My approach was very similar to that taken in “a year of whiteboard evolution“.

Since the start of April we’ve made 17 “tweaks” to the way the team works and have a backlog of nearly 30 more.

Last week we started adding estimates to tasks.

I trained the team on task estimation – it took less than 10 minutes to explain after one of our standups. The technical details on how I teach this are in my post on story points. But there’s more than just the technical aspect. (In fact the technicalities are secondary to be honest)

Here’s the human side of task estimation…

Tasks are estimated in what I describe as “day fragments” – essentially an effort hours equivalent of story points. These are periods of time “small enough to fit in your head”.

The distribution scale for task estimates I recommend is always the same. 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24 hours. (the last 3 are 1, 2 and 3 days) – It’s rare to see a task with a “24” on it. This offers the same kind of declining precision we see with Fibonacci-based story point estimates.

For the level of accuracy & precision we’re after I recommend spending less than 30 seconds to provide an estimate for any task. (Usually more like 5-10)

If you can’t provide an estimate then you’re missing a task somewhere on understanding what’s needed.

Any task of size 8 or more is probably more than one task.

Simply having an estimate on a task makes it easier to start work on – especially if the estimate is small (this is one of the tactics in the Cracking Big Rocks card deck)

By having an estimate, you have a better idea of when you’ll be done based on other commitments and activities, this means you can manage expectations better.

The estimates don’t need to be accurate but the more often you estimate, the better you get at it.

When a task is “done”, we re-check the estimate but we only change the number if the result is wildly off. E.g. if a 1 day task takes just an hour or vice versa. And we only do this to learn, understand and improve, not to worry or blame.

So why is this worth doing?

Within a day we were already seeing improvements to our flow of work and after a week we had results to show for it.

The majority of tasks fell into the 0.5 or 1 hour buckets – a sign of lots of reactive small items.

Tasks with estimates of 8 hours or more (1 day’s effort) were consistently “stuck”.

We spotted many small tasks jumping the queue ahead of larger more important items despite not being urgent. (Because they were easier to deliver and well-understood)

Vague tasks that had been hanging around for weeks were pulled off of the board and replaced with a series more concrete smaller actions. (I didn’t even have to do any prompting)

Tasks that still couldn’t be estimated spawned 0.5 or 1 hour tasks to figure out what needed to be done.

Large blocked items started moving again.

Team members were more confident in what could be achieved and when.

We can start capacity planning and gathering data for defining service level agreements and planning more strategic work.

I’m not saying you have to estimate tasks but I strongly believe in the benefits they provide internally to a team.

If you’re not doing so already, try a little simple education with your teams and then run an experiment for a while. You can always stop if it’s not working for you.

A quick update – Janne Sinivirta pointed out that “none of the benefits seem to be from estimates, rather about task breakdown and understanding the tasks.”

He’s got a good point. This is a key thing for me about task estimation. It highlights quickly what you do & don’t understand. The value is at least partially in estimating, not estimates. (Much like the act of planning vs following a plan). Although by adding the estimates to tasks on the wall we could quickly see patterns in flow of tasks that were less clear before and act sooner.

As we move from tactical to strategic work I expect we’ll still need those numbers to help inform how much of our time we need to spend on reactive work. (In most teams I’ve worked in it’s historically about 20% but it’s looking like much more than that here so far).

Martin Burns also highlighted that understanding and breaking down tasks is where much of the work lies. The equivalent of that in this team is in recognising what needs investigation and discussion with users and what doesn’t and adding tasks for those items.